One of the most conspicuous features of the Internet age is the proliferation of the use of email and other electronic messaging mediums. All computer users who can access the Internet also have the capability of sending and receiving electronic messages and many maintain multiple email addresses for different purposes. Yet, for a commercial enterprise or other organization who wishes to deliver their message by email a great many hurdles have arisen. Precisely because of the minimal expense required to send an email message itself, commercial email solicitation has become a greatly abused vehicle, to which has been attached the pejorative label of “spam.”
Certain individuals and organizations have successfully pressured many Internet Service Providers to close the accounts of individuals who send out high volumes of commercial messages, driving most large scale email senders to offshore servers, or to use surreptitiously the resources of servers belonging to other entities who may have left a proxy capability open. Because of the complaints of email address box owners, most email services now provide some kind of message filtering, which it is conceded cannot help but filter out at least some messages which the addressee perhaps would have liked to receive unimpeded. Those filters employ four main strategies.
First, various service agencies now maintain lists of IP addresses which have been associated with unsolicited commercial email senders. These lists are then used to blacklist incoming emails by the email service providers according to their source numerical IP, diverting them to separate junk mail boxes or dropping them entirely. Identified open proxies or other such problem domains which exhibit high volume become the basis of such lists.
Second, many sophisticated algorithms and methods have developed for analyzing the content of email messages looking for patterns which suggest a commercial solicitation. These techniques generally match the body and subject lines of an email against long laundry lists of flag words and expressions, such as “free”, the internet domain names of sites listed in outgoing emails, the brand names of various pharmaceuticals, sexual references, etc.
Third, the most common email filters do statistical analysis to glean other clues of the nature of a message like patterns or the presence of various email header entries or html tags, the manifestation on the web of large numbers of emails with identical subject lines or body text passages, and so on. In an ongoing game of cat and mouse the bulk message senders began incorporating strings of nonsense characters, superfluous tags, partial encryptions or even throwaway sections of random words in an attempt at stealth, which the filters now look for as well.
Finally, as a last resort some email service providers offer a brute force option where all email is blocked unless the recipient expressly authorizes the sender as a pre-approved email source address. This has the effect of essentially closing off one's email access to all but known friends.
As a result of all these counter measures, it has become increasingly difficult for even a fully above board enterprise to send out any significant number of email messages in the hopes that a respectable number will actually get through. Even those with meritorious and important political messages can get caught up in this. Unless one can reasonably establish that the email addresses on your list are people who have “opted-in” (given affirmative consent to be recipients even where not required by law) and one is willing to plead one's case from one email service provider to another, the hurdles are growing for any kind of email transmission system emanating from a central point. Ironically, the email service providers themselves may impose a default carte blanche web site policy on their own customers, to solicit them without limits, interpose intrusive advertising screens in the use of their “free” web site, etc.
On the side there have been some preliminary attempts at a peer to peer model. One may have encountered form pages which include one or more input fields for someone to provide email addresses of friends to whom a message will be forwarded. This has been described as viral marketing. Over a period of time it is possible to get the word out about a new product or event in this manner and on a large scale, but none of the demonstrated architectures has the capacity of creating a chain reaction effect overnight.
What separates these word of mouth campaigns in essential principle from actual viruses and worms is that in the latter cases the malicious software simply raids the email address boxes of its unwittingly infected hosts for addressees, and then emails them all en masse at the system level, often masquerading under the email address of the original infected user, rather than acting with disclosure and consent. The result in some cases has been an overload of server resources which is the primary negative of such episodes, where single individuals may receive hundreds of infected messages a day at the peak of such a breakout.
It is respectfully submitted that if a method could provide a more effective means for inputting email addresses (rather than one at a time) by a consenting participant in an email “tell a friend” program, it would greatly increase the yield of and speed at which such a system could bear fruit. If at the same time there were provided a method to prevent the multiple duplication of email messages to individual recipients which characterizes the behavior of malware, it would represent a quantum leap in the effective use of email both commercially and noncommercially. If relationships could be established with these participants over time, one might create a virtual network of email clients acting as a constructive peer to peer message delivery system for any worthy purpose.
Morever such a system might have substantial political impact. Organizations that entertain and compile political input universally fall into two categories. First, there are advocacy groups which seek to get people to sign petitions dedicated to a particular proposition, the results of which are intended to be transmitted to various government officials. Second, there are independent polling companies who also determine from their end what issues they will examine and who then make the results of their polls available either publically for or privately for cost to persons interested in those results. Polling companies do not take it on themselves to transmit the results of their polls. Neither of these entity classes provides a means for allowing the people being polled to help select what questions will be asked. A referendum web site that allowed real input as to its own direction might draw more participation from both sides of the aisle, having commensurately more influence.
This disclosure teaches how to construct just such a system, with novel proposals on how to construct a form with expanded email address inputs, for coordinating the use of those email address inputs globally over a network of consenting participating email clients, for using the virtual network created thereby as a distribution platform for ongoing email promotions and solicitations, both commercial and not, and for creating at the same time a dynamic participant driven referendum entity as a new breed.